Working At Play: A History of Vacations in the United States

by Cindy S. Aron

Overview

In Working at Play, Cindy Aron offers the first full length history of how Americans have vacationed--from eighteenth-century planters who summered in Newport to twentieth-century urban workers who headed for camps in the hills. In the early nineteenth century, vacations were taken for health more than for fun, as the wealthy traveled to watering places, seeking cures for everything from consumption to rheumatism. But starting in the 1850s, the growth of a white- collar middle class and the expansion of railroads made vacationing a mainstream activity. Aron charts this growth with grace and insight, tracing the rise of new vacation spots as the nation and the middle class blossomed. She shows how late nineteenth-century resorts became centers of competitive sports--bowling, tennis, golf, hiking, swimming, and boating absorbed the hours. But as vacationing grew, she writes, fears of the dangers of idleness grew with it. Religious camp grounds, where gambling, drinking, and bathing on Sundays were prohibited, became established resorts. At the same time 'self improvement' vacations began to flourish, allowing a middle class still uncomfortable with the notion of leisure to feel productive while at play. With vivid detail and much insight, Working at Play offers a lively history of the vacation, throwing new light on the place of work and rest in American culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190281564
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/13/1999
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Cindy S. Aron is the author of Ladies and Gentlemen of the Civil Service: Middle Class Workers in Victorian America, and is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Recuperation and
Recreation

* * *

THE PURSUIT of HEALTH
and GENTEEL PLEASURES

In early August of 1827 Elihu Hoyt arrived in Saratoga Springs from his home in Deerfield, Massachusetts. His diary records his surprise at what he discovered there: "One would suppose that we should find everybody here on the sick list—but it is far from being the case.... Many of the visitors come here probably in good sound health, for amusement, & for the sake of spending a week or two among the fashionable to see & to be seen.... We have fashionable balls, ... concerts, and all descriptions of amusement." Both Hoyt's expectation and the reality he encountered at Saratoga reveal much about the early history of vacations in the United States. Curing sickness and securing good health certainly motivated many of those who visited Saratoga during the summer. But the quest for amusement was also a critical part of the story.

    This chapter charts the beginnings of American resorts, the development of the first American vacationing public, and the debate over leisure that emerged toward the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It explores how elite Americans sought health and pleasure at springs and seashore and how more middling folks used religious camp meetings as sources of both recreation and spiritual restoration. Significantly, neither of these groups would have used the word "vacation" to characterize their ventures. Not until midcentury did the word "vacation" come to be used as a description forsuch journeys—at roughly the same time that ministers, doctors, and journalists began to devote considerable attention to the problems of leisure and amusement.

    The debate that ensued echoed persistent and enduring tensions within American culture over whether, how much, and under what conditions men and women might allow themselves time away from work for the purpose of recreation. During the 1840s and 1850s a range of voices tentatively questioned America's long-standing celebration of work and argued the benefits of leisure. These new ideas about the values of leisure and play, while far from uncontested, served nevertheless as an intellectual rationale that would help to make vacationing a widespread middle-class phenomenon in the decades that followed.

    The first American vacationers, however, were not middle class. The story begins, in fact, before much of an American middle class existed at all, as a tiny number of the eighteenth-century colonial elite made their way to a handful of springs and seaside watering places.

* * *

In 1744 when Dr. Alexander Hamilton, a prosperous Maryland physician, embarked on a four-month journey "intended only for health and recreation," he was undertaking an unusual venture for his time. Few people traveled for pleasure in eighteenth-century America. The dearth of good roads, bridges, maps, or places to stay enroute made travel slow, onerous, and sometimes dangerous. Since many roads could not accommodate carriages and few colonies offered public coaches, Hamilton journeyed on horseback. The taverns and private homes at which he stayed ranged from the comfortable to the flea-infested.

    Although traveling remained difficult, the later decades of the eighteenth century did see slight improvements—the initiation of public stage service, the building of bridges over a few important rivers, and the publication of a handful of regional road maps. Equally important for the history of vacations, however, was the development of a colonial elite with the time, financial resources, and interest to make life more genteel, pleasurable, and healthful. By the 1760s a few members of the gentry were making their way to some of America's first vacation places.

    A small number of South Carolina planters, for example, escaped the heat and disease of their plantations and sailed with their families up the coast to Newport, Rhode Island. They were joined by a handful of wealthy merchants from Philadelphia and some travelers from Jamaica. These early sojourners often spent as many as four or five months on the Rhode Island coast, where they benefited not only from the salubrious air but enjoyed concerts, dances, boat rides, and the company of congenial friends and acquaintances. But getting to Newport was still a long, arduous, expensive, and often dangerous venture. Little wonder that Newport's summer visitors remained few in number, ranging from twenty-nine to ninety-nine people a year in the decade before the American Revolution.

    During the late eighteenth century a smattering of other vacation resorts opened their doors to small groups of summer travelers. Wealthy merchants, planters, and politicians began to make their way to a few primitive watering places, primarily mineral springs, hoping to find health-restoring waters and agreeable company. Stafford Springs in Connecticut, Berkeley Springs in Virginia, and Bristol on the outskirts of Philadelphia were among the eighteenth-century springs that attracted members of the gentry.

    The elite Americans who initiated vacation travel in the late eighteenth century no doubt knew that they were partaking of a well-established European tradition. Europeans had been traveling to various spas since the late Middle Ages, pursuing both health and pleasure as they drank the waters, soaked in the baths, and enjoyed a variety of both innocent and illicit amusements. In England both royalty and members of the upper class began patronizing spa towns in the seventeenth century. As on the continent, such places drew not only the infirm, but elite visitors searching for amusement and entertainment. By the eighteenth century English watering places had begun to assume a more genteel and sober demeanor. In 1702 Queen Anne visited Bath, bringing the court, London society, and a veneer of respectability with her. Over the next decades impressive public buildings and more refined amusements attracted fashionable members of London society. Guests at Bath enjoyed sumptuous balls, concerts, dinners, and theatricals.

    Traveling to mineral springs may have provided a way for elite eighteenth-century Americans to ape the British upper class, but American watering places offered considerably less in the way of luxuries or even amenities than their English counterparts. When George Washington arrived at Berkeley Springs in 1761 he found that lodgings could "be had on no terms but building for them." He continued, "Had we not succeeded in getting a tent and marquee at Winchester, we should have been in a most miserable situation here." Conditions at Berkeley improved over the next few decades, but American watering places remained few in number and primitive in nature throughout the eighteenth century.

    The first half of the nineteenth witnessed a slow but significant increase in the numbers of vacationers and of vacation resorts. Seashore, springs, and mountains began receiving guests, many of whom sought to protect or improve their health. The scourges of cholera and yellow fever that swept through cities in the summer frightened many into fleeing their homes. Philip Hone, a member of the New York elite, took his family from New York City to Rockaway, Long Island, during the summer of 1832 to escape from cholera. Residents of Boston faced similar problems that year. Charles Francis Adams protected members of his family by sending them to their country home in Medford. Heat and humidity brought a variety of afflictions to those living on southern plantations as well. As a result, planters and their families often repaired in the summer to more healthful, up-country homes or to various springs.

    Escaping disease proved only part of the incentive to travel. People were also intent upon seeking health. Doctors often recommended traveling to locations where their patients would benefit from the climate, air, and water. Nineteenth-century physicians understood ill health to result from an imbalance—either an excess or deficiency—of various bodily fluids. Seeing the body as a closed system with a finite reserve of energy, doctors also posited that people possessed an essential but limited amount of "vital force." Most doctors agreed that stimulation and excitement were particularly liable to deplete the system. Orthodox medical practice aimed to maintain this delicate balance of energies and fluids, often by most unpleasant methods. Bleeding, leeches, blistering, and the use of powerful chemical purgatives formed part of the arsenal of "heroic" treatments of regular physicians. Discharging enough quantities of blood, sweat, feces, or partially digested food would, doctors maintained, restore patients to health.

    Beginning in the 1820s and persisting throughout the following decades, a variety of health reformers, unhappy with the dangerous and painful remedies of "regular" or "allopathic" doctors, searched for more benign techniques. These popular health movements spawned a variety of "irregular' physicians—Thompsonians, homeopaths, hydropathists, and electromagnetists among others. Looking to less violent and painful treatments, irregular physicians often substituted natural and vegetable remedies for the chemicals and poisons of the orthodox practitioners. While still holding to the belief in the importance of maintaining a balance of fluids and conserving "nervous energy," irregular doctors also began to discuss the benefits of hygiene, fresh air, vegetarian diets, and exercise. Nature, many believed, could be enlisted in the cure and prevention of disease. After the 1830s, even orthodox physicians—partly in response to competition from irregulars—began to moderate their practices and put more store in the power of nature. By midcentury some of the more extreme heroic measures fell into disfavor, bloodletting became a more infrequent practice, and doctors relied upon smaller doses of medicines.

    Traveling in search of air or water fit the prescription of both regular and irregular doctors. Both believed that change of climate could alter the balance of bodily fluids and that mineral waters, operating as powerful diuretics and laxatives, could produce the same effects. As irregulars, health reformers, and later traditional doctors advocated fresh air, temperate climate, sunlight, bathing, and exercise, the salubrious benefits of various summer resorts became increasingly apparent.

    Change of air—particularly the move from an intemperate to a more moderate climate—could, some physicians felt, mitigate or even cure some diseases, among them consumption, asthma, gout, and rheumatism. In 1835 Robley Dunglison, medical professor at the University of Maryland, published a textbook on Elements of Hygiene, the long title of which is revealing: On the Influence of Atmosphere and Locality; Change of Air and Climate; Seasons; Food; Clothing; Bathing; ... &c &c. on Human Health. Dunglison maintained that many people who claimed to have been cured by the waters at various mineral springs were, in fact, helped primarily by the air. "Long before the citizen of our Atlantic towns reaches the Alleghany springs of Virginia," Dunglison asserted, "he has an earnest of the advantage he is about to derive from change of air; and many a valetudinarian finds himself almost restored during the journey, fatiguing as it is, through the mountain regions, which have to be crossed before he reaches the White Sulphur [Springs]." Dunglison understood as well that trips to watering places could work their magic on the body through the mind and spirit. The "varied scenery and society, absence from cares of business" helped patients recover. While not denying the potential benefits of the water, Dunglison still claimed that "taking invalids in general, we are satisfied that more is dependent upon change of air than on the administration of waters."

    Despite Dunglison's skepticism, by the 1830s American doctors were devoting considerable attention to the healing and restorative powers of water. Hydropathy would not become a distinctive branch of American medicine until the 1840s, but doctors were endorsing the benefits of water decades earlier. Although physicians took interest in water in all forms—sea water, fresh water, and mineral water—the latter seemed to claim particular attention. In 1831 Philadelphia physician John Bell, for example, took specific notice of the curative possibilities of various thermal and mineral springs in his Treatise on Baths and Mineral Waters. Bell explained that mineral waters contained many of the same ingredients found in the apothecary shops, but that "mineral waters ... produce the therapeutical effects ... with more ease, and with less perturbation, and even in a painless manner."

    The list of diseases that mineral waters allegedly cured was legion—gastrointestinal problems, respiratory infections, skin eruptions, rheumatism. These claims sometimes came from physicians with a financial interest in the springs who may have exaggerated a tad. In 1846 Dr. Thomas Goode, the proprietor of the Virginia Hot Springs, published The Invalid's Guide to the Virginia Hot Springs in which he included testimonials from patients who professed that the waters cured not only gastrointestinal and rheumatic problems, but deafness and paralysis as well.

    The continued endorsement of the medical profession no doubt helped to encourage the opening of more springs and seaside resorts during the 1820s and 1830s. At the same time improvements in transportation—roads, canals, and the introduction of steamboat service along inland rivers—made journeying to such places somewhat less onerous. And while conditions at many resorts remained primitive and travel continued to be slow, the number of guests began to increase.

    Saratoga began to develop as a resort during the 1820s. Until then Ballston Spa, just a few miles away, had attracted most of the visitors to the area—some of whom had taken short trips into Saratoga to try the water there. By 1821 the two largest hotels in Saratoga, the Pavilion and Congress Hall, held from 150 to 200 people each. Philip Stansbury visited Saratoga in July of 1822 and found 800 "strangers" there. Elihu Hoyt, who was so surprised to find healthy people at Saratoga, reported in 1827 that "1200 strangers" were currently "at the Springs, & that 12,000 in all have visited during the present season."

    In the years after 1820 new resorts also sprang up around the numerous mineral springs that dotted the western part of Virginia. Most of these springs began as small, modest establishments, but the demand for rooms often surpassed the supply. Travelers frequently reported arriving to find no place for them. William Stabler in 1838 wrote to his cousin Sallie of his trip to the Red Sulphur, where he was going for "restoration." Along the way, however, he had "been repeatedly informed that they were full to overflowing ... and that many had to lodge on the floor of the Dudley room." He decided that he had traveled too far "to be put back by any but insuperable difficulty." The rumors, he soon learned, were true. "Immediately on getting out of the stage I entered my name in the Register and inquired if I could get a room? The manager informed me that he intended to put 4 of us in the room ... until the next day when he would try to do better for me."

    Seaside resorts, as well, were beginning to attract visitors during the 1820s and 1830s. The sea had not always presented a benign or welcoming image. Indeed, as Alain Corbin has brilliantly explained, up until the middle of the eighteenth century much of Western culture regarded the ocean as a dangerous, forbidding place. It represented the abyss, called up remembrance of the flood, and suggested uncontrollable and even demonic forces. Over the course of the eighteenth century the "fear and repulsion" of the ocean was replaced by a growing belief in the therapeutic potential of cold sea baths and an aesthetic appreciation of the sublimity of sea and shoreline. Romantic artists and poets helped to make the seashore a place for contemplation — a "favorite spot for self-knowledge."

    By the early nineteenth century Americans were making their way to a variety of spots along the coast. Cape May, which had begun to receive visitors from Philadelphia in the 1810s, boasted two hotels in 1823. When William Brobson, a Wilmington lawyer, visited Cape May in August of 1825 he was among the forty guests at "the largest and most pleasant" of the houses that he found there. Ten years later a third hotel had been built, and by 1840 a fourth was in operation. Numerous boardinghouses, some of them reputedly "very large," also accommodated lodgers. Nahant, along the Massachusetts shore, catered to a Boston clientele during the 1820s. Josiah Quincy, mayor of Boston, sent his wife and daughters there in August of 1824 despite warning that "Boston was absolutely emptied, and that every house in Nahant was absolutely crammed, and that as to our getting lodgings at the Hotel, it was perfectly absurd to attempt it." Newport continued to host Southern planters and their families, many of whom spent the entire summer at the Rhode Island resort.

    Diaries and letters of visitors to these springs and seaside retreats recorded detailed descriptions of their maladies, hopeful bulletins of improvements, and discouraging reports of relapses. Nor were these casual references of the "I'm fine" or "feeling better thank-you" variety. Traveling invalids reported to loved ones back home on the amount of water drunk, food ingested, wastes expelled, and pounds gained or lost.

    Jane Cary Randolph, for example, journeyed in 1829 to some of the Virginia springs in search of health. In a letter to her mother from the Salt Sulphur, she apologized for not having written earlier, claiming ill health as her excuse: "I have not mended so rapidly since the first week—frequently suffering with pain in the side and debility. We staid a fortnight at the White Su[lphur] & yet, although I drank freely of the water, it had but little effect." Her husband suggested that they move on to the Salt, where, he claimed, "the waters are considered more active." Many invalids journeyed from one Virginia spring to another in search of the water that would best cure their specific problems.

    Although watering places often made extravagant claims for the vast range of diseases that their waters could cure, doctors and patients alike believed that waters varied in their effectiveness and that certain springs could cure certain ailments but were useless for others. Thus the nature of their complaints often determined the destination of summer travelers. In the early 1830s George Harrison wrote to his sister from Warm Springs explaining that he and his wife were comfortably accommodated there while waiting for suitable quarters to become available at the nearby Hot Springs. He had chosen the Hot because he had "reason to believe the baths there eminently useful in afflictions of the stomach" and he wished "Isabella to use them under the most favorable circumstances." Mrs. E.M. Grosvenor wrote in July of 1833 from Saratoga informing friends about her and her husband's cure:

Everything is very pleasant and I think these waters may promote health, if they do not restore ours. We commence cautiously. Mr. G. takes both Congress and Empire, with advantage. I take Empire water. The Physician does not encourage me much about drinking the water as it is not considered good for consumptives.... The air strengthens my lungs, and the rest and quietness do me more good than any kind of medicine. I have not taken the water yet long enough to test its benefits in regard to my case. My cough is not worse than it has been.

Most watering places provided scales, because patients kept close track of and reported on their weight. Many diseases, specifically consumption, left the patient thin and wasted; gaining weight signaled a hopeful return to good health. Susan Blain, for example, had accompanied her ailing brother to White Sulphur in 1831 and wrote their father informing him that "Brother Archie has fattened very much since we left home; he weighed at Sweet Springs the other day 192 pounds and bid me say he is fattening hourly."

    Those who visited these places were often compelled to witness the unappealing, sometimes even repugnant, afflictions of their fellow sufferers. Charles Irving visited the Red Sulphur in August of 1834 where he counted about one hundred guests, two thirds of whom were "invalids" and most of those suffering with consumption: "To see the poor creatures coughing and spitting is a sight which I assure you is by no means pleasant—a great many are low—one died here on yesterday ... as for my health I hope I am better my friends say I am better but I feel not much changed. I have fattened some two or three pounds!" Irving decided to remain one more week at the Red Sulphur before moving on to the White Sulphur. His decision may have been sparked, at least in part, by a desire to flee the melancholy environment of the Red for the more cheerful company at the White Sulphur.

    Following doctors' advice in some instances meant heading for springs or seashore. But physicians had also prescribed travel itself as a cure for illness. The advice of British physician James Clark, appearing in an 1843 article in the Democratic Review, claimed that "the mere act of travelling over a considerable extent of country is itself a remedy of great values, and, when judiciously conducted, will materially assist the beneficial effects of climate." Some patients apparently took such suggestions to heart. Daniel Safford, a man who parlayed a blacksmith shop into a successful iron manufactory and then devoted himself to various reform causes, learned from his doctor that travel would help to maintain his health. His wife explained: "The difficulty in his heart, from which he had suffered more or less for many years, had increased to an alarming degree, owing, it was thought, to protracted sittings in a crowded house, without proper ventilation.... His physician advised that he should spend his summers thereafter in traveling, as the means most likely to prolong his life." The young Rutherford B. Hayes received similar advice. In 1847, still a young, struggling lawyer in Ohio, he found himself suffering from "a sore throat, brought on, as the physicians say, by confinement, etc., in my office.... [T]he doctor says ... that to effect a perfect cure I must leave the office for a year or two and try an entire change of habits of life, diet, climate, etc." Hayes settled for a two-month trip to New England where he visited friends and relatives, fished, sailed, and climbed Mt. Washington. He returned to Ohio well enough to resume his law practice.

* * *

There is little doubt that many of the early nineteenth-century Americans who traveled either to specific watering places or simply to escape the confines of home and work did so in hopes of recuperation and restoration. A third "r," however, accompanied the other two. "Recreation" was an important part of this story.

    The letters and diaries of those who visited these watering places commented not only on the health imperatives that sent the writer there, but also on the numbers of other visitors whose primary motivation for visiting was not health, but rather pleasure or fashion. Invalids frequently took note of the amusements and activities of the healthy. For example, Mrs. Read, the wife of a Bedford whaling captain, asserted that health had necessitated her visit to Saratoga in 1826, but also recorded in her diary: "The pleasure parties and balls every evening in this village engross the attention of the old and young, sick and well...." Jason Russell, in the last stages of consumption, traveled to Saratoga in 1839 on recommendation of his doctor. His journal recorded that the "various" amusements of the visitors included "rifling, concerts, assemblies, cotillion parties every evening except Saturday, and games of all descriptions from tossing coppers to the billiard tables." Saratoga, he concluded, could "hardly be termed a resort for invalids but rather of wealth and fashion, there being in all probably forty people in health to one that is sick." It is impossible to know the exact proportion of the fit to the ailing. Certain watering places attracted more of the former and others more of the latter. Mineral springs probably included a higher percentage of invalids than did seaside resorts, although the springs certainly drew their share of pleasure seekers.

    The infirm usually did not travel to these watering places alone. Frequently one or more relatives accompanied the seriously ill member of the family. The primary purpose of the visit was the cure of the invalid, and those who attended him or her might also hope to benefit from the water or the air. But such escorts were usually ready to engage in recreation and entertainment. Samuel Hoffman, for example, accompanied his father from Baltimore to White Sulphur for two months during the summer of 1832. His father was quite ill, "surprisingly weak" and unable to "sit up for any length of time at once." Still, Hoffman noted that he was "improving" and hoped that a few days would find him "about." Hoffman assured his wife that "I pass nearly all my time with him of course, giving an hour in the morning and in the afternoon to riding." Hoffman's description of a typical day's activity revealed that, despite the demands of his role as invalid's companion, life at White Sulphur was far from unpleasant for him:

I rise at 6 and appropriate the time up to 8 to drinking the waters—lounge for half an hour after breakfast, when I mount my Horse for an hour or more then betake myself to my room, say about 10 1/2 o'ck—read—write and sleep a little till 2—dine—return to my room to read—at 6 ride either on Horseback or in a Barouche—Sup at 8—and though we have a fine band, and dancing-room, I leave it for my room—which, by the by, is particularly comfortable.

Not a bad way to spend a few months, as Hoffman himself agreed: "I have never known time at a watering place to pass so rapidly or so agreeably. So much so that I find it difficult to accomplish all I desire."

    Even the people who sought health were not necessarily invalids. They had journeyed to such places hoping either to improve their already satisfactory health or to avoid the harmful summer climate of their homes. Savvy resort proprietors learned quickly to cater to clients who hoped to combine recreation with recuperation. It was not difficult for health resorts to serve, equally well, as pleasure spots.

    Guests at most resorts seemed to follow similar rules about who could indulge in what pleasures. From Saratoga to the Virginia Springs billiards quickly became a staple of resort life, but only for men. Some men played an occasional game, others spent many hours around the billiard table. Men also gambled, often at cards. Blair Bolling found himself bored at White Sulphur in 1839, in part because he was "averse to participating in what forms a pretty general source of amusement for the company, viz. card playing in one way or another, from the genteel game of whist to the farobank." By the late 1840s men visiting Saratoga could frequent a room off the bowling alley where "there were faro tables, roulette, card games, and many other gambling jimracks."

    But most amusements were not gender-specific. Indeed, the extent to which male and female guests engaged in the same sorts of activities reveals that different, more relaxed codes of conduct prevailed at resorts than at home. Women who sojourned at these watering places engaged in forms of amusement that would have been forbidden elsewhere. Both male and female guests, for example, played nine pins. William Stabler wrote to his cousin Sallie from Red Sulphur Springs in 1838 reporting that he had "found ladies and gentlemen including a couple of clergymen at nine pins." The game was, he felt "a pretty robust exercise for the ladies." Not all people approved of women's participation. Elihu Hoyt was a little shocked to find two women, daughters of a local farmer, competing with guests at Saratoga in 1827. Not only locals, but female guests played nine pins. On the second morning of his 1837 visit to Saratoga, Samuel Dawson, a young cadet from West Point, visited the nine pin alley and found there "a party of Ladies who seemed to enjoy the Game very much." Dawson reported to his friend being "considerably amused at the manner in which they rolled the ball."

    While most watering places offered billiards for men and nine pins for members of both sexes, specific resorts became known for distinctive forms of entertainment. Resort owners tried various strategies to keep their patrons happy and entertained. During the 1830s Saratoga installed a miniature circular railroad "with a car, where two persons can sit together and propel themselves." If new technology offered one of the attractions at Saratoga, the Fauquier White Sulphur tried enticing visitors with more historical forms of entertainment. The Fauquier boasted yearly medieval festivals, complete with jousting and other competitions. In the 1840s White Sulphur allowed a company of actors to convert an unused stable into a theater and charge fifty cents to guests for the performances. The theater apparently held 400, "including the gallery in which the colored people sat." But one guest remembered that "it was never very full whilst I was there."

    Those who visited the seashore spent time bathing in the ocean. William Brobson, the Wilmington lawyer who visited Cape May in August of 1825, found that the "principal amusements" there were "bathing and dressing." Both men and women bathed in the "morning, noon and evening," although not at the same time. The bathing hours were, he explained, "separate for ladies and gentlemen; saving the privilege of married men, who attend their wives." There were, apparently, limits to how much codes of conduct could be relaxed. In the 1820s the notion of ladies and gentlemen bathing together remained beyond that limit.

    Although bathing may well have been segregated by sex, what distinguished most resort activities was the extent to which men and women enjoyed them together. During the very decades when prescriptive literature was mandating separate spheres for men and women, those who frequented early resorts were spending considerable time with members of the opposite sex. Young Samuel Dawson described the "routine of pleasures" of a typical day at Saratoga in 1837:

Breakfast at eight o'clock, and then all retire to the drawing room and the Ladies and Gentleman for an hour or so promenade, then a party either takes a ride out to a very beautiful little Lake called Saratoga, situated 4 miles from the village, or go down to the nine pin alley and play until they get tired.... They dine at two, promenade up and down the drawing room for an hour and then take an evening walk or go to the circular railway and ride round for a while.... Sup at six; promenade and then at eight the dancing commences and continues until twelve or one.... It is almost impossible to give you any idea of the high enjoyment a person may have there for two or three days.

A structured informality seemed to characterize resort life. Each place had its own routine—times for drinking the water, times for meals, times for promenading and visiting, times for bathing (in either mineral waters or ocean), times for carriage rides, times for specific games and entertainments. Those who so desired could keep apart from the crowd. But most visitors—at least the healthy ones—seemed to want to join the throng.

    Evenings were the premier time for socializing. Guests sometimes got up tableaux vivants and charades to entertain themselves. Diaries and letters repeatedly mention the dances and parties that took place—often nightly. Hops, balls, and cotillions were regular occurrences. An anonymous diary described the evenings spent "either with balls[,] music or conversation or something better" at Saratoga in 1825. Susan Blain, staying at White Sulphur Springs in August of 1831, informed her mother that balls occurred "every night."

    Balls and dances encouraged courting, another important amusement for which watering places quickly became known. Resorts, even those initially renowned for their health-giving possibilities, offered arenas for men and women to meet, socialize, play, and sometimes find mates. In his 1833 book, A Moral and Political Sketch of the United States of North America, Achille Murat described Saratoga this way: "The papas and mamas are ready to die with ennui all the day; the young ladies play music, the young gentlemen make love to them; ... in the evening comes dancing." A male visitor to the Red Sweet Springs in Virginia reported on the "great many elegant, pretty and agreeable ladies" who enjoyed "charming beaux to wait upon them." He enjoyed being included among the latter, explaining, "I am constantly going from morning till night, first with one & then another...."

    The amusements available at early nineteenth-century resorts befitted the class and status of the clientele. These were, for the most part, genteel people pursuing genteel pleasures. Visitors would not have found the raucous entertainments of frontier culture or the seedy pleasures of the urban underworld. There is little evidence of either goose pulls or rat baiting finding their way to watering places in the few decades after 1820. Gentlemen were permitted to gamble and play cards, only so long as ladies were not present. Men and women took care to bathe (in either mineral springs or ocean waters) at separate times. And even when visitors engaged in unusual sorts of activities, they always did so in the most refined manner. Mrs. Read had traveled to Saratoga in August of 1825 in the hopes of recovering her health. While there she received a "polite invitation" to accompany a group to the lake: "We made a little fishing party and I found it a very pleasant amusement as I had the good fortune to catch four.... We passed some time in admiring this truly beautiful collection of water; the boat we went fishing in had an awning on top, which made it very comfortable." Fishing was not a customary sort of entertainment for ladies. Mrs. Read's description of the event, however, reveals her efforts to render the outing genteel. The "polite invitation," "very comfortable surroundings," and opportunity to enjoy "truly beautiful water" turned an unusual activity into an acceptable form of female amusement.

    The people who frequented these places would have expected no less. Those who patronized resorts and watering places came, primarily, from the more settled parts of the country and the more well-heeled sections of society. The elite had the time and resources to travel, whether for health or for pleasure. William Brobson, himself a respected lawyer and businessman, remarked in his diary in 1825 on the recent "increase" in the "fashionable propensity for tours of pleasure and visiting watering places and sea shore, during the summers when relaxation from the labour of business is desirable." The "wealthy and the fashionable," he observed, had begun to devote part of the summer to traveling to places like Niagara, Saratoga, and Cape May.

    Brobson was right. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century wealthy Americans escaped unhealthful cities or plantations, sought cures for ailments, or simply enjoyed themselves at a variety of new summer watering places. Elite southern planters—the Lees of Virginia, the Singletons of South Carolina—regularly took or sent their families, for example, to the springs. Guests at early nineteenth-century resorts came, as well, from northern families like that of Josiah Quincy, the mayor of Boston who became president of Harvard in 1829. Catharine Sedgwick—member of another well-placed Massachusetts family and, by the 1830s, a well-known literary figure—enjoyed visits to Saratoga, Warm Springs, and White Sulphur. Sidney George Fisher of Philadelphia, someone who could live quite nicely off the income from his family's property, enjoyed himself for a few weeks during summers of the late 1830s at Newport and Long Branch. And elite New Yorker Philip Hone—while claiming he hoped to avoid cholera or other diseases plaguing New York during the summer months—was clearly seeking and finding a variety of pleasures in his yearly summer visits to Saratoga, Ballston, and Long Island.

    It was primarily people like the Quincys, Sedgwicks, and Hones, along with southern planters and their wives, who frequented watering places during the first half of the century. While not members of an idle aristocracy, neither were they people whose days were consumed with the problems of earning a living. Able to leave their investments, plantations, domestic responsibilities, or business affairs for extended periods of time, many visitors to early nineteenth-century watering places were not so much taking a vacation from work as changing their location in a search for health and enjoyment.

    People with limited or even moderate economic resources found little opportunity for such extended holidays. Diaries of lawyers, school teachers, businessmen, and farmers in the first half of the nineteenth century rarely mention anything resembling a vacation. Adolphus Stern, for example, was a German Jewish immigrant who lived in Texas, married a Catholic woman, and became active enough in both business and politics to be elected to the Texas House of Representatives in the late 1840s. A man of some means, the owner of a few slaves, Stem's diary still revealed no evidence of anything remotely resembling an extended respite from work—either for health or for pleasure. Half a continent away, Sally and Pamela Brown, school teachers in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, in the mid-1830s, also found no time for anything but work. When they were not teaching school they were busy mending, sewing, and spinning. In the late 1830s John Peters worked as a merchant and an agent. He traveled from Mississippi to New York and back again trying to drum up business or, when that failed, find employment. But he never visited the springs or seashore. The poorest members of society, of course, lacked both the time and the resources for such ventures. Day laborers, struggling journeymen, and domestic servants could not have taken off on "tours" to Newport or "jaunts" to the springs. Neither were farmers able to leave their land for extended summer excursions to summer resorts.

    Occasionally evidence surfaces of someone with less than substantial means embarking on something like the sort of trip we have been describing. Hezekiah Prince was a young man who worked first as a customs inspector and then as an insurance agent in a seaport on the coast of Maine. In July of 1826 he traveled with a friend to "old Capt. Bradford's in Herring Gut" where they remained "for a week or more ... to try the sea air, bathing, &c for the benefit of our health." While health was his stated purpose, his description of the week clearly made it sound like a pleasure trip. He spent his time walking about the island, fishing, lobstering, and bathing. Only once did ill health appear to crimp his style, resulting in his decision not to join a fishing expedition because "they wished to remain out all night which would not have done for invalids."

    Prince was not a member of the elite. Neither, of course, was he journeying to a fancy watering place. "Old Capt. Bradford's in Herring Gut" probably did not appear on the Quincy's, Sedgwick's, or Hone's list of destinations. That he was able, however, to spend the week at the shore would have distinguished him from most of his contemporaries. Not until midcentury would people like Prince begin to form a middle-class, vacationing clientele. In the meantime, the ability to leave home for an extended stay remained primarily the preserve of people with substantial means.

* * *

With one important exception. During these decades considerable numbers of people from the middling and lower orders engaged in activities that in some ways resembled vacationing. They attended camp meetings. If the search for health brought the wealthy to springs and seashore, the search for salvation brought many people of meager means to yearly camp meetings. These events were, of course, organized for religious not recreational purposes. But most scholars agree that camp meetings played a critical social function for those who participated. As such, these camp meetings became some of the first nonelite vacation destinations—places where ordinary folk fashioned institutions and conventions that suited both their spiritual and their recreational needs. Not surprisingly, the sites of a few of the early nineteenth-century camp meetings became enduring middle-class vacation resorts in the decades after 1850.

    The earliest camp meetings began as Presbyterian revivals on the Kentucky frontier during the last years of the eighteenth century. Presbyterians quickly became disenchanted with the displays of emotionalism that attended camp meetings and within a few years abandoned them to Methodists. Throughout the next four decades Methodists enthusiastically embraced and promoted camp meetings as a means of encouraging religious fervor and increasing the number of their adherents. Methodist encampments grew in number and spread throughout the United States. From Martha's Vineyard to the Minnesota Territory, through Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, and into the slave states of the South, thousands of Americans flocked to yearly encampments. Camp meetings usually lasted from four to eight days, although a few continued as long as twelve, and drew anywhere from a few hundred to many thousands of people from as far away as fifty miles.

    The comments of observers and participants reveal that these camp meetings served more than a religious function. Rural people, especially those living on the frontier, often led lonely lives. A trip to the yearly camp meeting may have been one of the few opportunities to break the monotony, get some relief from the labor of farm and household, meet new people, and socialize in a large group. In 1822 a visitor to a camp meeting in Warrenton, Virginia, estimated that as many as five thousand people attended on Saturday and Sunday, with the number dropping to one or two thousand for the remainder of the week. He described the varied sorts of people who congregated there—some were penitent in their prayer, while others "made great parade about religion with no other view than to exhibit themselves as object of admiration before men." Still others, "disdaining such hipocrisy [sic], yet entirely neglectful of the avowed cause of the meeting, gave themselves up, with much zest and glee to the social enjoyment which the large assembly afforded."

    Camp meetings attracted not only the pious. Observers—many of them critical of the revivals—frequently mentioned the rowdiness, the immorality, and the people selling and drinking whiskey on the fringes of the encampments. Organizers, too, recognized that large crowds of people often provoked unacceptable sorts of behavior. By the 1830s Methodists were establishing rules and posting a watch to try to keep socializing and unruliness from interfering with religion.

    The social nature of camp meetings was apparent not only in the disorderly and sometimes inebriated crowds, but in less egregious sorts of behavior. Young people, for example, took the opportunity of camp meetings to scout out potential mates. Remarks of many who attended sound not unlike those who observed the goings-on at fashionable watering places. Lucien C. Boynton, the president of the Northumberland Academy, visited a Baptist Camp Meeting in Westmoreland, Virginia, in 1842. He recorded in his diary: "On Saturday and Sunday there was not a little prominading [sic] and courting on the part of the beaux and belles, somewhat to the vexation of the preachers and the annoyance of the attentive part of the audience." Her experience at an 1846 Georgia Camp Meeting prompted one young woman to record in her diary: "I have attended the Houston camp meeting and enjoyed myself well in one respect. We had beaux in abundance, which always gratifies the vanity of girls—too much for their spiritual good."

    Most camp meeting participants lived in tents, often arriving in wagons loaded with all they would need to make themselves comfortable during their stay. The visitor to the 1822 Virginia camp meeting described the tents pitched there as "placed close together," but noted that "about 40 or 50 ... were very commodious and quite elegant establishments." By the 1830s many encampments, especially in the Midwest, were becoming permanent campgrounds. According to historian Charles Johnson, some of these places had "wooden cottages, some two stories high, substituted for the simple cloth tents." Captain Frederick Marryat described in 1838 a campground near Cincinnati encompassing "an acre and a half ... surrounded on the four sides by cabins built up of rough boards." A preacher's pulpit at the center was encircled by "hundreds of tents pitched in every quarter." Marryat discovered that these tents included many amenities: "Every article necessary for cooking; mattresses to sleep upon, etc; some of them even had bedsteads and chests of drawers which had been brought in the waggons [sic] in which the people in this country usually travel."

    Neither did attending camp meetings require abstaining from good food. At Warrenton "the cooks and waiters were all busy (in the rear of the tents), as ... at a barbecue, or at a tavern on a court day, the former preparing, the latter arranging on the tables the most abundant & choice fare." After dinner those who "strayed about in the surrounding wood" would find there "immense piles of watermelons, barrels of various kinds of cakes, and several sorts of confectionery for sale."

    Certainly not all camp meetings offered either commodious accommodations or tasty fare. Many people lived in simple tents and cooked over campfires. Even spartan conditions, however, proved no deterrent to the thousands of people who journeyed yearly to camp meetings throughout the country.

    The experience of those who attended camp meetings obviously differed from that of wealthy guests at springs and seaside. Visitors lived primarily in tents rather than in hotels or boarding houses. Camp meetings did not provide the same sorts of opportunities for recreation that elite watering places offered. No fancy balls or bowling alleys. The sociability and occasional rowdiness at camp meetings were by-products rather than the prescribed purpose of the event. Still, the two experiences shared some important characteristics. Attending a camp meeting afforded a trip away from home for a number of days and nights, an opportunity to leave the cares of farm or household behind, and the chance for any number of new social experiences. Just as the wealthy sought physical health at watering places, people of lesser means pursued spiritual restoration at summer camp meetings. If the elite left the springs with renewed health, camp meeting participants may well have returned home in a state of spiritual rebirth, or at least relaxed enough to face chores of farm and homestead.

* * *

In the period, then, between about 1820 and the middle of the nineteenth century a variety of Americans—invalids in search of health, members of the northern elite, southern planters and their families, and folks of limited means pursuing salvation—began to indulge in behavior that resembled vacationing. None, however, would have used the word vacation to describe the experience.

    Prior to the 1850s most Americans used the word vacation not to designate a time set aside for travel or recreation, but to refer to students' or teachers' break from school or college. Even Appleton's Illustrated HandBook of American Travel, a large compendium of information about travel published in 1857, never mentioned the word "vacation." The book claimed to be a guide to the "cities, towns, waterfalls, battle-fields, mountains, rivers, lakes, hunting and fishing grounds, watering places, summer resorts." The author, T. Addison Richards, encouraged Americans to travel, to explore, and to spend as little as a week or as much as the whole summer visiting new places: "Go somewhere, if you can, all of you, and wherever and whenever you go, God speed you on your way and send you duly back wiser, better, and healthier and happier men and women." He used numerous words to describe the people and the experience—traveler, tour, resort, summer stay. But not vacation.

    During the 1850s, however, the word vacation slowly crept into both private writing and published works. Richard Henry Dana Jr. took vacations of some sort almost every summer beginning in the early 1840s, referring to them as "excursions" rather than "vacations." But in 1856 he recorded in his diary, "Sailed for England, in the Steamer America, to spend a short vacation." Thereafter he always called his various summer trips vacations.

    Dana and others may have started calling their trips "vacations" because articles about vacations began to appear in newspapers and magazines by the 1850s. For example, an 1855 editorial in the New York Times entitled "Vacations for Business Men," urged men to put aside their unending quest for wealth and to remember other needs—good health, long life, enjoyment, and a vigorous progeny. Businessmen ought to take a vacation from their labor and allow themselves rest, sport, and recreation; they ought to "grasp at less and enjoy more." Incessant work, the article warned, would result in a life "sans health, sans stomach, sans capacity for all better and higher things." The use of the word vacation signaled a heightened effort to promote the idea of vacationing.

    By the early 1850s readers of newspapers and magazines were increasingly likely to hear advice about the advantages of a vacation. In August of 1855 the New York Times described the pleasures and benefits of passing time on the still undeveloped shore of northern New Jersey. City people who felt "worn and weary with their Winter's watching" could find "relaxation from the toil of gathering up riches. During the season they revel in these waters of life, or dream away the passing hours on the wooded hillsides—and then when Autumn comes they are back again to the busy mart, when they renew their old contests with the world, and feel again the old heart-burnings, the old cares and the old thirst for money-getting." An article on "The Wilds of Northern New York" that appeared in an 1854 issue of Putnam's Monthly Magazine recommended "much in this region to draw hitherward the pleasure-loving." Able to "retire from the busy world, away from its noise and tumult, its cares and perplexities," the traveler to these spots would enjoy not only the healthful influence of "pure air and fresh breezes" but would discover how sublime scenery and sights fed the intellect and the imagination.

    Moreover, medical advice about the importance of respite from work and the benefits of travel to various watering places was finding its way from the pages of medical texts to the mainstream press. In 1843 the Democratic Review ran an article called "The Medical Philosophy of Traveling" detailing the arguments of physicians who warned of "the wear-and-tear" complaint. Victims of this malady—often characterized by a variety of nervous and digestive problems—were likely to be those urban dwellers who had strained "the thinking faculties." Particularly at risk were "merchants engaged in deep and involving speculations." Such people could, however, find relief "in the relaxation and corporeal exercise sought in a pure rural atmosphere." Citing a number of medical texts, the article maintained that not only ruralizing, but the experience of travel itself, along with beneficial changes in climate, could work wonders for mood, digestion, and appetite. Physicians had been making such claims for a number of decades and advising their patients accordingly. But midcentury began to see such recommendations quoted, summarized, and repeated in the popular press.

    As these examples suggest, Americans in the 1850s were being offered new reasons for taking a summer respite from work even as old admonitions about health continued. Where the search for a cure or the protection of the body from disease had motivated many of those who traveled to seashore or mountains in the early nineteenth century, by the 1850s vacationers sought other goals. First, mental and spiritual renewal were becoming as important as physical regeneration. Taking a vacation would make the businessman not only healthier, but more fit for his daily tribulations. The message was, at this point, addressed specifically to men. Middle-class women were, in theory, permanently at leisure and therefore had no "work" from which they needed a vacation. Second, pleasure and amusement were becoming more than an enjoyable by-product of a trip planned for other purposes. Recreation was increasingly an end in itself.

* * *

Both the incorporation of the word vacation into public and private discourse and the more frequent endorsement of the benefits of vacationing signaled the beginnings of an important shift in attitudes toward work and leisure. In the early nineteenth century, widely held cultural norms regarded work as the core of a moral and stable social order. Church-going Protestants, especially those living in the Northeast, were likely to spend Sundays listening to sermons on the virtues of work and the potential dangers of play.

    Such admonitions perhaps seemed all the more necessary since, in the words of one religious publication, "the fast habits of our modern life" had begun quickly "crowding in." While America was still overwhelmingly rural, the numbers of people living in urban communities grew measurably over the first half of the century. Early industrialization and the growth of commerce were creating numerous smaller cities like Lowell, Massachusetts, and Rochester, New York. By 1850 New York City and Philadelphia could count their residents in the hundred thousands. Such cities hosted a growing variety of commercial amusements. Theaters, "museums" that featured various sorts of entertainment, circuses, and minstrel shows welcomed substantial numbers of paying customers. At the same time prizefighting, horse racing, and a variety of other blood sports attracted an audience of predominantly working-class men.

    While much commercial leisure originated in the cities, it reached far beyond the population of urban dwellers. Roads, canals, and early railroads were not only making urban pleasures and dangers more available to rural people, they were also bringing a variety of entertainment—itinerant jugglers, acrobats, menageries, and circuses—into the hinterlands. Like it or not, growing numbers of people had the time, inclination, and money to play.

    And many—particularly religious leaders—did not like it. As a range of new commercial amusements started to become available, religious men found themselves faced with "the necessity for some solution" to the "Amusement problem." Where once community surveillance and the dread of divine retribution had kept people on the straight and narrow, a more anonymous urban culture and the decline of strict Calvinist ideas made pleasures both more available and less frightening. As the process of secularization encouraged Americans to "embrace the world," God-fearing Christians and their moral leaders were left with an important question. What sorts of leisure activities were morally acceptable and what were not?

    The extremes were pretty clear. At one end, leisure spent in the pursuit of intellectual or spiritual self-improvement fell in the permissible column. Attending lectures and reading moral literature (many still found fiction suspect) were allowed. The other end of the spectrum was equally clear. Bawdy houses, taverns, and blood sports were beyond the pale. But a vast and expanding range of pleasures remained between these two extremes.

    Critical in determining acceptable from forbidden pleasures was the distinction between "recreation" and "amusement," a distinction that the Puritans had established centuries earlier. Puritans, for all their celebration of work, were not ascetics. They had recognized the human need for relaxation, endorsing as appropriate recreations like "walking, riding, fishing, fowling, hawking, hunting, ringing, leaping, vaulting, wrestling, running, shooting, singing of Psalmes and pious Ditties." Recreations were uplifting; they refreshed and readied a person for work. Amusements, however, left people enervated and drained. Puritans counted the theater, for example, as one of the worst and most dangerous sorts of amusement. The theater allegedly incited extreme emotions and left the spectators exhausted. It also encouraged degeneracy among the actors who, rather than following an "honest occupation," were "making a profession out of a recreation."

    More than two hundred years later many Protestants still clung to the distinction between recreation and amusement as their moral guide, condoning the former and condemning the latter. A contributor to the Congregationalist publication, The New Englander, explained in 1851: "A recreation ... is something which recruits, restores, and prepares the man for better service, and should be engaged in, always, with this end in view." But an amusement left people "wasted," "exhausted," and "with an aching head." Amusement was "pleasure for pleasure's sake." Scripture endorsed recreation but forbad amusement.

    It was, however, not always so easy to tell which was which. By the middle of the nineteenth century the distinction between recreation and amusement had grown increasingly muddied. Dancing at a ball might be sinful amusement, but dancing in your home could be healthful and invigorating recreation. Were square dances (cotillions and quadrilles) a form of beneficial and innocent exercise but round dances (waltzes and polkas) an example of disgraceful and promiscuous behavior? Attending the theater could fall in either category, depending on the composition of the audience and the play being presented. With an audience cleansed of rowdies and a carefully chosen playbill, the theater, some maintained, might be an uplifting experience.

    In antebellum cities respectable men and women engaged in a variety of amusements—some of which the clergy would have condoned, but others of which remained suspect. Isaac Mickle, a young man reading law in Philadelphia in the 1840s, attempted to negotiate a comfortable course between the array of urban pleasures and his personal moral convictions. Mickle came from a wealthy Quaker family and moved in important circles. He spent much of his leisure time (of which he managed to find a good bit) going to lectures and visiting at the homes of respectable young ladies. But he also engaged in less proper forms of amusement. On New Year's of 1842, reflecting on the year past, he admitted that he had "acquired a knowledge of some games of skill, among which that of billiards is the most interesting and therefore the most dangerous." The danger lay partly in the sort of people whom the game attracted: "A junto of young men more respectable for their birth than their lives—a bevy who move at once in the highest and lowest circles of society." He resolved "to forsake it altogether." While recognizing the moral dangers of billiards, Mickle had few qualms about attending the opera, the theater, and even a "grand ball" where "the company numbered about four hundred, and was very brilliant." Although Mickle himself never danced, he noticed and enjoyed the "many very pretty girls there, and some very good dancers" and "found inducements nevertheless to remain until the end—which was about five o'clock in the morning."

    The gradual acceptance of various forms of enjoyment resulted from a complex process by which American culture became more urban and more worldly. In part, the presence and participation of elite people helped to elevate and to bestow gentility and legitimacy upon some amusements. But religious leaders also played an important role. Rather than ceding the realm of leisure to the enemy, some ministers began to argue in favor of amusements, provided they were regulated and controlled by people with religious and moral sensibilities.

    The earliest challenge came from liberal denominations, particularly Unitarians. Eschewing the notion of human depravity in favor of a belief in the basic goodness of human nature, Unitarians found little difficulty in embracing the notion that life should afford pleasure. As early as the 1830s William Ellery Channing, the dean of American Unitarianism, began to question the orthodox Protestant distrust of play. In 1837 Channing delivered an address on temperance in which he held that "man was made to enjoy as well as to labor, and the state of society should be adapted to this principle of human nature." He reminded his listeners that God had "implanted a strong desire for recreation after labor" and had "made us for smiles more than for tears." Play was important because it served to preserve a moral order. Unless "innocent pleasures" were available, Channing warned, people would choose dangerous and even "criminal" ones.

    Although Channing looked more kindly on the idea of enjoyment, he still drew a distinction between recreation and amusement with which most orthodox ministers would have been comfortable. Pleasures should "refresh, instead of exhausting the system" and not produce "boisterous mirth." The difference came in the sorts of things that, for Channing, counted as acceptable forms of recreation. Such pleasures included not only music, recitations, and lectures but dancing (as long as the dancing did not occur at balls) and a theater that, if reformed, "would take a high rank among the means of refining the taste and elevating the character of a people."

    Channing's celebration of play reaffirmed its important relationship to work. The right sorts of amusement would ultimately serve rather than undermine the value of work, because they would "send us back to our daily duties invigorated in body and spirit." Even if Channing's ultimate goal remained the preservation of "invigorated" workers, his endorsement of widely condemned amusements—especially his willingness to countenance the possibility of theater—represented an important challenge to orthodox Protestant thought.

    By midcentury the Unitarian magazine Christian Examiner was prepared to go well beyond Channing's earlier attempts to redeem certain enjoyments. An 1848 article rehabilitated the notion of amusement itself, arguing that "amusements, under the plan of Providence, form an essential part of the great system of influences by which human faculties are trained." Claiming that pleasures need no longer serve a purpose, the writer implicitly rejected the orthodox distinction between recreation and amusement: "A sufficient reason for participating in them [amusements] is that they give pleasure." The article also challenged traditional Puritan directives against the wasting of time, holding that there was "no better way of spending time than in enjoying what God has given to be enjoyed."

    Liberal ministers and religious writers remained a minority voice, but continued to endorse innocent amusements as a means of discouraging harmful and vicious ones— "driving out bad entertainment by providing good." A theater that Christianity had helped to reform and purify, dancing that occurred in the homes of moral and religious people, and a military band that played on the public square at public expense could all help to reform the tastes and guard the morals of pleasure seekers. Even sinful amusement could turn beneficent when put to innocent purpose. A bowling alley, for example, was "a public nuisance" when it attracted "the idle and dissipated ... for the purpose of gambling." But "a bowling alley made use of in a large city, as the best kind of exercise within their means, by men who spend ten or twelve hours a day leaning over desks in offices and counting-rooms, may be to them the source of health and lengthened days and useful labors." While never discarding the notion that leisure activities could be useful, liberal religious thinkers tried to bestow the virtue of usefulness on a range of ordinarily proscribed amusements even as they made the case for pleasure being its own reward.

    These notions issued primarily from Unitarians, a tiny minority of antebellum Christians. Most Protestant ministers, less convinced of the righteousness and virtue of their flock, would have warned their parishioners to stay out of theaters and bowling alleys. But by midcentury a few important ministers within mainstream denominations also began to confront the questions of work and leisure. It was becoming increasingly clear that the growth of commercial culture, especially in the urban Northeast, put numerous temptations in the paths of good Christians. Some ministers realized that simply exhorting their parishioners to work and railing against the evils of amusements would not suffice. Somehow they would have to reckon with the needs and desires for entertainment of even God-fearing Christians. Many resisted, adhering to the orthodox line and preaching prohibition. But others accommodated the more secular culture in the hopes of being able to shape and influence it.

    Horace Bushnell's 1848 speech before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of the University of Cambridge reveals how some religious leaders were rethinking the issue. Bushnell, a widely known and controversial Congregationalist minister from Hartford, entitled his speech "Work and Play." He emphasized the importance of both, calling them "the universal ordinance of God for the living races." "No creature lives that must not work and may not play." People work, he held, because they "must, because prudence impels." But play came from "a fund of life that wants to expend itself." Bushnell saw work as an "activity for an end," while play was an "activity as an end." Bushnell thus challenged those ministers who found play acceptable only when it "prepare[s] for new scenes of labor and usefulness." In fact, Bushnell claimed the reverse—that people worked so that they could play. Work was the "temporary expedient," not life's goal:

To imagine a human creature dragged along, or dragging himself along, under the perpetual friction of work, never to ascend above it; a creature in God's image, aching for God's liberty, beating ever vainly and with crippled wings that he may lift himself into some freer, more congenial element—this, I say, were no better than to quite despair of man.

He quickly added, however, that he meant not to "derogate thus from the dignity of work." Rather, work was ennobled and honored by serving as preparation for "a state so exalted." In the end, Bushnell saw in play the place where poetry was created, where genius was cultivated, and ultimately where Christian religion resided.

    Bushnell's elevated notion of play fit his efforts to make gentility and refinement a part of Christian culture. Good taste and beauty, Bushnell maintained, were "attributes of God." Those who had secured and enjoyed the trappings of refinement—by building lovely houses for example—were not wasting their efforts in frivolous pursuits but were contributing to God's plan: "Architecture, gardening, music, dress, chaste and elegant manners—all inventions of human taste—are added to the rudimental beauty of the world, and it shines forth, as having undergone a second creation at the hand of man." Historian Richard Bushman has explained how during the first half of the nineteenth century refinement became "virtually an expression of godly morals." Some of the pleasures of genteel refinement seemed not unlike the pleasures of genteel play—the beauty of opera, the splendor displayed at a ball. Indeed, Protestantism's embrace of refinement may have helped make acceptable the sorts of leisure—opera, theater, and balls—that wealthy, genteel people enjoyed.

    Perhaps no nineteenth-century religious figure reveals both the changing ideas about and continuing conflict over work and leisure as well as does Henry Ward Beecher. Beecher had imbibed the ethic of hard work from his well-known father, Lyman, who had "vented his nervous energies by exercising on parallel bars and shoveling sand from one corner of his basement to another." In the mid-1840s Beecher, then a struggling young minister in Indianapolis, delivered a series of sermons, published as Addresses to Young Men, that sounded the strictest of orthodox Christian admonitions to work hard and shun play. Beecher warned against idleness of any sort, even "reading for the relief of ennui." While he ceded the "necessity of amusement" and believed that "gaiety of every degree ... is wholesome to the body, to the mind, and to the morals," he counseled young men to look to nature and the beauty of God's work for enjoyment. Other sorts of amusements—gambling, horse racing, theater, cardplaying, taverns—bred pools of sin and depravity.

    But within a few years Beecher began to alter his message. By the early 1850s he was ministering to the wealthy parishioners of the Plymouth Church in suburban Brooklyn—people who could afford the time and money for relaxation. Beecher quickly came to understand the conflicts his parishioners faced—knowing the importance of work, thrift, and discipline but lured by the pleasures of wealth, luxury, and status. Influenced by the romantic love of nature that had inspired Channing, Bushnell, and others, Beecher began to suggest that leisure and relaxation could be a route to God. Writing in July of 1854 from Lenox, Massachusetts, where he and his family were spending their two-month vacation, Beecher extolled the virtues of leisure:

Thus to walk, to read now and then some noble passage of some great heart, to fall off again to musing, to read again half aloud or in a murmuring whisper some holy poetry, this it is to be transcendently happy.... It is after long labor that such periods of rest become doubly sweet. For unwearied hours one drifts about among gentle, joyous sensations or thoughts, as gossamers or downy seeds float about in the air, moved only by the impulses of a coquetting wind.

The Beecher family stayed on a farm—the very symbol of American industriousness. But for Beecher, the primary purpose of this specific farm was not to produce sweat and yield sustenance but "to lie down upon." Three years later Beecher wrote again about his summer experience, explaining that to enjoy a vacation one must have a "decided genius for leisure." Those equipped with such a genius understood that "you must not be in a hurry to get up in the morning or to retire at night. You must regard it as quite the same, whether you look at a tree ten minutes or thirty." For a culture bred on "early to bed and early to rise," such sentiments were, indeed, radical. Beecher was using language that hinted at the value not just of recreation, but of idleness.

    Beecher would no doubt have denied that idleness was his goal. In fact, he would have maintained that the purpose of leisure was self-improvement and education. Neither did Beecher disavow the importance of work. His sermons remained a mélange of often contradictory ideas—sanctioning work and excoriating laziness, then cautioning his parishioners about the hazards of too much activity and pleading the importance of rest and leisure. Still, Beecher's ideas and his example (he regularly vacationed for two months in the summer) served notice that, even in the Protestant Northeast, leisure was gaining respectability.

    The South had inherited a different legacy. The earliest southern colonists did not bring with them the divine command to work that had motivated their Puritan counterparts in New England. Elite white southerners had been flirting with leisure long before a few northern ministers began tentatively to tout the virtues of repose. Slavery, of course, played a big part. Eighteenth-century southern planters from William Byrd to Thomas Jefferson recognized the importance of work and attempted to inculcate a work ethic in their children and their slaves. But extolling the value of work was difficult in a society in which the bulk of the labor fell to slaves. For antebellum southerners, work was not necessarily the repository of all virtue. Before northern physicians and ministers had warned about the potential pitfalls of too much work, some southerners were pointing to the North's preoccupation with work as an example not of behavior to be emulated but of a "frenzied acquisitiveness."

    Leisure held a different place in the slave South than in the industrializing Northeast. Always wary of being accused of dissipation or laziness, southern writers began in the early nineteenth century to offer a defense of leisure. If work held the potential for degradation, its opposite—leisure—could be a sign of elevation and civilization. And some southerners did invoke this classical notion of leisure, maintaining that being relieved of the necessity for work freed white planters to spend their time in higher pursuits—learning, culture, and public life. The reality rarely matched the myth. By the antebellum decades southern planters—often self-consciously aping the English elite—were more likely to spend their leisure gaming, hunting, or on an extended stay at the springs. The evangelical revivals of the early nineteenth century and the consequent spread of Methodist and Baptist ideas did temper some of the southern enthusiasm for play. Revivals left in their wake prohibitions of gambling, cardplaying, and dancing. Southern evangelicals, like their northern counterparts, found most amusements "suspect." The fact remains, however, that southern planters had recognized leisure as a potential good at a time when most northerners still found virtue to reside almost exclusively in work and industry.

    The shifting attitudes toward work and play that surfaced in the mid-nineteenth century found expression, as well, in the endorsement of what came to be known as "muscular Christianity." During the 1850s several ministers, most notably Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Edward Everett Hale, began to decry the then current notion that holiness of the spirit required weakness of the body. Writing for the Atlantic Monthly in 1858, Higginson argued that Americans needed strong bodies if they were to succeed in the challenges that contemporary life posed. Once, he explained, the demands of the frontier and the threat from hostile Indians had "created an obvious demand for muscle and agility." But urban Americans, wrongfully believing that "a race of shopkeepers, brokers, and lawyers could live without bodies," found themselves plagued by "the terrible records of dyspepsia and paralysis." Higginson's answer was physical exercise, but not shoveling sand from one corner of the room to another. He advocated, rather, various forms of athletics and play. Swimming, sailing, rowing, skating, baseball, and football would all serve to build healthy, "muscular Christians."

    Those who embraced physicality and strenuosity were responding to a host of problems that seemed to be troubling nineteenth-century Protestants. While Higginson had endorsed physical exercise for girls as well as for boys, those who endorsed "muscular Christianity" worried primarily about the health and status of Christian men. The influence of an increasingly large and vocal female constituency in many Protestant churches made some churchmen uneasy. At the same time urban luxuries, consumer goods, and the softness of city life seemed, to some, to be undermining the toughness and manliness of Christian men. Complicating this potential crisis of masculinity were the problems posed by class. Cities increasingly offered a host of urban amusements to serve the population of working-class men—prizefights, gambling houses, blood sports, brothels. Protestant ministers worried that such temptations would prove too great for some of their middle-class parishioners.

    Given these concerns, wholesome athletics could serve a multitude of purposes. Athletics required self-discipline and control—virtues that Protestants encouraged as necessary for success in the world of work. Moreover, athletic participation helped to promote and to demonstrate the strength and manliness of Christian men. As importantly, athletics could offer upper-class and middle-class men an alternative to dangerous commercial entertainments and perhaps even lure some working-class men away from ratbaiting and gambling to more innocent sports. By the end of the 1850s numerous men's colleges were beginning to build gymnasiums for their students. During the postbellum decades the YMCA would offer middle-class men a safe place to indulge in sport, helping to make amusement and play acceptable parts of middle-class life.

* * *

As Americans encountered more leisure opportunities, they also faced a mélange of sometimes contradictory advice about whether and how to enjoy them. While no firm consensus was reached, by midcentury a few guidelines had been established. First, reputable medical opinion counseled the importance of respite from work and the benefits of traveling to places where water, air, climate, and enjoyable company could work some good. Second, some influential religious figures had begun to discover the value of certain kinds of leisure. Although certainly not discarding their commitment to the value of work, some ministers were arguing that play was part of God's plan. A few religious leaders were even tentatively challenging the long-standing Protestant proscription of pleasure for its own sake and, just as tentatively, redeeming a variety of amusements from the realm of sin to the world of morality and respectability. And all of these new ideas were making their way into the public press as popular magazines and newspapers explored the possibilities and advantages of a stay at the seashore, springs, or mountains.

    What did all this mean for would-be vacationers? On the one hand, they might feel secure that a trip to a vacation spot rested safely at the moral end of the leisure spectrum. Summer resorts, because they promoted health, fit within even the narrowest definition of acceptable leisure. That more doctors were beginning to argue that sojourns to such places would leave the vacationer refreshed, reinvigorated, and ready to work only reinforced their value.

    On the other hand, much that happened at summer resorts fell on the other side of the ledger. Dancing, billiards, bowling, cardplaying, and gambling occupied many of the guests. When Mrs. Read described the "pleasure parties and balls" that occurred nightly at Saratoga in 1826, she confided her fears that "this place ... will prepare more souls for destruction than these efficacious waters will heal infirm bodies." Guests who objected could and apparently did choose to remain aloof from unsuitable activities. Southern evangelicals, for example, frequented the springs of Virginia but never participated in the round of balls and parties. Mrs. Read spent most of her month in Saratoga in quiet repose—drinking the water, attending church, chatting with the other sickly guests at her boarding house, and lamenting the profane and godless behavior of the multitudes around her.

    Not all guests shared Mrs. Read's qualms. In fact, large numbers of people apparently felt comfortable participating in what many Americans would have labeled morally questionable amusements. The quest for health, genuine to be sure, no doubt contributed to the ease with which guests enjoyed the pleasures around them. Bathing in mineral waters or ocean surf, for example, could be transformed from a sensuous indulgence to a legitimate cure. The air of legitimacy and respectability that the elite, genteel clientele bestowed upon these resorts may have deflected criticism and helped to assuage the misgivings of some visitors.

    But not entirely. Watering places remained on ambiguous moral ground, occupying a shifting and tenuous place on the spectrum of leisure-time pursuits. The endorsements of physicians and the tentative approval of liberal ministers did not totally dispel fears about leisure or play. Leisure remained contested. Indeed, the history of vacations over the next century is eloquent testimony to that contest. Americans struggled to fashion forms of vacationing that would allow them to reconcile their desire for leisure with persistent cultural dictates about the importance of work and the dangers of play. Vacation places became sites where these tensions were mediated and tested, if never entirely resolved.

    What the religious debates, medical writings, and newspaper articles of midcentury had done, however, was to make recreation, amusement, and leisure respectable enough so that increasing numbers of the emerging middle class felt willing to contemplate the possibility of a vacation. What they needed were places to go and the means to get there.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1
Part One Inventing Vacations
1 Recuperation and Recreation: The Pursuit of Health and
Genteel Pleasures	15
2 "Summer hotels are everywhere	": A Flood of
Vacationers	45
3 "through the streets in bathing costumes": Resort
Vacations, 1850-1900	69
4 "No late hours, no headache in the morning	":
Self-Improvement Vacations	101
5 "a jaunt	agreeable and instructive": The
Vacationer as Tourist	127
6 "Unfashionable, but for once happy!": Camping Vacations	156
Part Two Into the Twentieth Century
7 "Vacations do not appeal to them	": Extending
Vacations to the Working Class	183
8 Crossing Class and Racial Boundaries: Vacationing in
the Early Twentieth Century	206
9 "It's worthwhile to getsomething from your holiday":
Vacationing During the Depression	237
Epilogue	258
Notes	263
Index	315

Editorial Reviews

Aron skillfully traces the evolution of vacations, while simultaneously describing the insecurities that the burgeoning phenomenon raised. She very astutely begins with the Puritan distinction between "recreation" and "amusement"...and examines the growth of self-improvement resorts, religious camps, chautauquas and educational world's fairs as a response to the increasing reports of licentiousness and dissipation that came from seaside resorts and fashionable spas.
— In These Times

John Ghazvinian

Ms. Aron argues in her book that however captive to work people may be while on vacation now, it originated as a benefit and then became a marker of middle-class status.
— New York Times

Felicia B. Lee

Solid research and chatty anecdotal evidence support her argument that vacations have done more for Americans than merely stuff their closets with souvenirs.

USA Today

A fascinating slice of social history, Aron's book sheds light on a subject few have thought warranted serious study.

Chicago Tribune

Usually the only vacations I'm interested in are my own, so it comes as a pleasant surprise that Working at Play is so very, well, interesting....The book contains fascinating tidbits, like the fact the by the 1920's beaches around New York were "foul with urban refuse," prompting encounters with not just other swimmers but also the "body of a dog, sheep, chicken, or cat. New York Times Book Review

Andrea Higbie

Although both of these books are written by academics and cover the history of travel, their focuses and styles are quite different. Voyages and Visions is a collection of loosely related essays written by professors from Britain and Spain. The comprehensive introduction by editors Elsner (art history, Courtauld Inst.) and Rubi s (history, Univ. of Reading) deals with the early history of travel and travel literature, from the Greeks and Romans to medieval pilgrimages. Other essays cover the writings of Petrarch, Montaigne, Bernier, and Rennell; travel accounts from the New World and Europe; mountaineering; and even travel in science fiction. The writing styles vary, with some essays more readable than others, but all delve into literary and historical theory. While equally substantial, Working at Play is a somewhat easier read. Aron, a professor at the University of Virginia, focuses on the history of vacations in the United States, offering extensive accounts from newspaper and magazine articles, letters, and diaries. She discusses the progression of American attitudes toward vacations. At first, vacations were for the rich and were often taken for health reasons until advances in transportation and the belief that refreshed workers are more productive led to vacations for most Americans. Aron details how the idea of church-related and educational vacations springs from the Puritan fear of idleness. There is also discussion of women's roles and vacations for minorities. Both books are recommended for academic social history collections.--Kathleen A. Shanahan, Kensington, MD Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

An entire book about Americans and their vacations? At first glance, it seems a frivolous, almost wacky wacky notion. But this is precisely what Cindy S. Aron has undertaken in this scholarly, thoroughly entertaining and perceptive volume.
— Wall Street Journal

Birmingham

An interesting if somewhat academic social history of the American vacation that examines the tension between the American work ethic and the concept of leisure.

Kirkus Reviews

"A fascinating slice of social history, Aron's book sheds light on a subject few have thought warranted serious study."—Chicago Tribune

"Offers fascinating insights into American attitudes toward leisure."—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"In this fascinating study Aron shows that the idea of taking time away from work for leisure is a relatively recent development."—Booklist

"An engaging and highly readable study of Americans and their vacations. Aron skillfully illuminates the complex connections between work and structured leisure from Methodist camp meetings through Chautauquan self-improvement to today's laptop computer at the beach."—Karen Halttunen, Professor of History, U.C. Davis

"Aron's fascinating book reveals how vacations became a regular part of American life and why we still don't feel comfortable taking those vacations. There are many remarkable features to this book-crisp prose, impressive research, well-chosen quotes, and delightful anecdotes, for example. But most remarkable of all is that this important story has not been told before. We may have trouble taking pleasure in our vacations, but we can surely take pleasure in reading Aron's book."—Roy Rosenzweig, George Mason University

"Working At Play is an historical tour de force. Meticulously and imaginatively researched, written with wit and style, smartly illustrated with period photographs, and persuasively argued, Cindy Aron's new book fills in a very large gap in our own history by describing the critical role played by vacation resorts, vacationers, and leisure activities in the making of the modern American middle class and the shaping of its vexed and fluid gender relationships. From its first chapter on early 19th-century journeys for 'health recreation' to its concluding chapter on vacationing during the Depression, Working At Play, like the perfect vacation, entertains and enlightens its readers. It should enjoy a huge audience among academics and the general public."—David Nasaw, The Graduate School of the City University of New York

"Aron makes fascinating observations about such topics as sports and physical exercise for women, how concepts of public modesty changed with the 'bathing costume' and the role social reformers and charitable groups played in both expanding and limiting the vacation possibilities for immigrants and the inner-city poor. Accessible and enlightening, Aron's social history deserves a popular and wide readership."—Publishers Weekly

"An interesting if somewhat academic history of the American Vacation that examines the tension between the American work ethic and the concept of leisure."—Kirkus Reviews

"Usually the only vacations I'm interested in are my own, so it comes as a pleasant surprise that Working at Play is so very, well, interesting."—Andrea Higbie, The New York Times Book Review

"Scholarly, thoroughly entertaining, and perceptive"—The Wall Street Journal

"[A] well researched, persuasive examination of vacation."—The Washington Post

"Simply a lot of fun to read—the result of that rare combination, exhaustive research and engaging writing."—The Women's Review of Books

"[A] pathbreaking study...Thoroughly researched, elegantly written, and painfully relevant to contemporary life, Aron's books is a treat for lay and scholarly reader alike." The International Journal of the History of Sport

"Working at Play...[is] based on widespread and imaginative research...[An] intriguing excursion into American holiday habits and mindsets."—Business History

From the Publisher